


Unbelievable

by homecriticismchef



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Cure Fic, Friendship, Gen, Magic and Science, Rash Illness (Stand Still Stay Silent), pigs returning to normal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 02:45:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7341475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homecriticismchef/pseuds/homecriticismchef
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Siv doesn't know how to deal with success - and in this particular instance, Taru can't really blame her. (Cure!fic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unbelievable

**Author's Note:**

> This story is ... not exactly a prequel to "Postscript", but it's sort of an accidental companion piece built around what might have happened in Mora to set off some of the events implied in that story (e.g. Siv's touring team, Taru's nonstop smiling).
> 
> Fittingly, I owe a second batch of thank yous to Minutia-R for a second round of generous, insightful beta reading!

 Taru was an early riser. She couldn't have broken the habit in Mora if she'd wanted to, what with headquarters also being home to three raucous children. Lately, they'd taken to waking up at five a.m. to play Cleanser Camp Troll Attack, and they weren't terribly interested in integrating the first rule of survival - stay silent - into the game. (At least the little monsters had started school - and had a year with a non-Swedish babysitter - so they couldn't get away with ignoring basic commands in Icelandic anymore.)

Taru could think just fine in noisy circumstances - in any circumstances really. She, and probably a few hundred other people, would've bit the dust a long time ago otherwise. She just needed something to think about, to make the chaos _tolerable._

She was lacking that this morning. She resorted to aimless pacing, which typically wasn't good for much, but which put her in the perfect position to hear a knock on the front door at about ten-thirty.

She did not expect who she saw.

"Siv?"

Siv, glancing nervously over her shoulder, snapped back to attention and grabbed Taru by the upper arms. "Help. Help me."

Taru stepped back, pulling her inside. "Siv, why are you knocking on your own front door?"

"Is this my house? I can't trust reality any more."

Taru slammed the door - she still didn't know any of the neighbors here, and didn't want to, but everyone involved was probably better off not listening in as Siv had a nervous breakdown.

She grabbed her by the shoulder and dragged her into the dining room. "Siv. Breathe. You're supposed to work this morning, aren't you?" They sat down - rather, she did, and Siv braced herself on a chair's edge in a tense imitation of the custom.

"I was at work." She nodded. "And then I lost my mind, apparently, so I had to come home -"

"No, stop. You're shaken up."

"I'm not shaken up."

"Close your eyes - good. Now, who are you?"

Siv opened her eyes again, only enough to glare. "I'm not that _kind_ of crazy."

"You knocked on your own front door. What," Taru continued, slowly and as gently as she could manage – so not very - "happened at work?"

Siv laid her hands on the table, stared miserably down at them, and took a deep breath. "The trial to cure the latest subjects. It ... worked."

"Oh?" It was such an automatic response - make a sympathetic sound to keep the traumatized individual talking - that it came out before she understood what Siv meant. The vaccine, or the cure – worked?

"You think I'm crazy too, then?" Siv sighed.

"I think you should tell me what happened."

Maybe her friend and colleague had in fact lost her mind - you never knew, these days - but why would that happen now of all times? Taru found it more probable that Siv's inexperience with success meant she didn't know how to handle it.

Which indicated that this might, just _possibly_ , be a productive morning after all.

* * *

What happened the day before, as Siv told it – overriding Taru's objection that she had only asked about _this_ morning _-_ was that Trond had found Onni slumped over at the radio in the morning, and in his bland chilly way had banished the man to the main room just as Torbjörn was taking the children to school. He had dispatched Onni to pick up some groceries, forgetting that the apparently ascetic mage didn't carry money. Siv had been asked to deal with that.

"Wait. We still aren't paying Onni?" The first year of the expedition had hardly been a failure on the book-gathering front. In fact, most of Taru's time yesterday had been happily eaten up in sorting through buyer contact information and requests, and trying to match them up with likely "sources" on various Silent World maps for next winter's perusal. They could afford to pay Onni  _something._

"He hasn't asked, all right? So I left him at the shop with ... enough to get by ... don't look at me like that, Taru. And I told him I was continuing on to work, and he followed me there. Silently. When I caught him, he just said he would buy the food on the way back to the house."

"And your boss was just fine with this?"

"More than fine, unfortunately. Onni mentioned he was involved in the expedition -"

Taru winced. "He _is_ technically part of our team."

"And Janina just couldn't do enough to make his visit _informative_ after that. Put him in a suit, took him through the specimen room -"

"What a time for him." Taru couldn't help but imagine Onni ducking under tables at his first sight of the monstrosities Siv had described working with.

"I don't know, because I was ordered to get to work. The pigs, you remember?"

"Oh right, the pigs." Apparently there'd been a great find - the hideous kind of great - of a rightfully abandoned hog farm during a sweep of the plains south of old Östersund. Just small enough to wrangle into crates, morphed limbs and all; just big enough to beat vermin beasts as test subjects. Something like that.

"So I'm running the default tests - visible change, reaction times, temperature, skin sloughing -"

"Scientist stuff, I believe you."

"Then I looked away, and then I heard. Well. Chanting."

Taru stared at her.

"Onni, I mean. He must have sneaked in the minute I turned my back to check over my notes, which -"

"And he was _chanting_?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe he was just talking to diseased pigs, but it sounded different. Rhythmic."

"Like a runo." At Siv's meaningful look, she added, "Call it a weird prayer, if you'd like."

"Taru, I have actually heard of runos. And runes, for that matter."

"Fair enough."

"He ... finished praying, I assume, and said he was going to go buy groceries now. And left. Well, first he asked where to leave the suit."

"That was polite."

"Taru. The pigs he was praying to - or at?"

"Over. Heathens or not, we don't pray to pigs."

"Fine. But those three are ... I can't say it. Taru. This is why I know I'm crazy."

They were showing signs of recovery?

Taru couldn't think of a gentle way to phrase the question, so she didn't bother. "You think the cure requires magic to work. It's not crazy."

"It's absolutely impossible. I’ve lost my mind, and I need someone I trust to help me find it again." Siv stood up and seemed to be reaching at the chair back for her coat, until she realized she'd never taken it off in the first place. "Come back with me. Please?"

* * *

Taru had thought it was only prudent to rouse Onni again before they left, just to get the full story on what happened the day before.

Siv had thought this was a terrible idea, and Taru’s assurances that even a strong mage wasn't capable of mind control (much less of completely destroying someone's perception of reality) failed persuade Siv otherwise. Denying she'd had any such ridiculous suspicions did, however, force Siv to go along with Taru's plan with a minumum of complaint.

Okay, so it was still like pulling teeth. Some teeth needed to be pulled. And once the three of them got through Janina's somewhat confused greetings – Siv whispered that _of course_ she hadn't told the others what happened, but Taru was welcome to do that for her - and back into Siv's lab, Onni put the pieces together, dropped his aloof mystic act, and turned downright _helpful._

"The injection did halt the sickness." Onni looked over at the pigs, which did look rather more normal than they should already. He crossed arms and ran his up and down his clean suit's sleeves, but he didn't hide under anything. "However, if a being's spirit is scared and resisting the transformation, afraid of what it's becoming because of what the rash illness did before, it ... seems not to understand the healing process is different. So I told them to remember."

"You made them remember, what? That healing is a safe process?"

Siv was staring into space. She looked ... absent.

Onni must have read it as incomprehension. "Did she not understand that?"

"I understood just fine, thank you. His Icelandic really has been getting better," she added, to Taru. (Onni muttered a clipped "thank you", which Siv ignored.) "Look, I'm not saying this is the worst case scenario. That's what we _had -_ decades passing with no progress, no effect or even worse effects on subjects of all kinds. No matter what we tried. But ... spirits? _Confused spirits._ "

"Hey, look on the bright side: they're going to eat this up in Reykjavik."

"How is that a bright side again?"

"They'll probably set some of their own mages to work the minute we tell them about this. Assuming they have any of the trial batch left. They'll -"

"They'll do it in Norway," Siv interrupted.

"So?"

"Nothing, just saying. No rash-infected matter has been or will ever be allowed into Iceland. Ever."

"They get seabeasts ashore sometimes. And you're changing the subject."

She sighed again. "Remind me that only being able to report good results from trials that involved _appealing to exotic gods_ is not the worst thing that could have happened here?"

Taru smiled, and crossed the lab to clap her friend on the shoulder. "You don't need me to remind you. What you need is lunch."

"Lunch sounds delicious," Onni broke in. He made it sound more like lunch had stolen his winter hat and kicked his puppy and he wanted to seek vengeance against it, delicious or no, but he got that way when he was hungry. Who didn't, sometimes?

* * *

Between the three of them, they'd decided to hold off on making any grand announcements until they could be more certain they had a cure on their hands. (Taru would have hesitated to agree, knowing that Siv's definition of _certain_ was rather less forgiving than hers, if she hadn't been fully aware that Siv's husband made that less forgiving attitude prudent so very, very often.)

So Taru didn't bring it up with her until they could be alone. That happened after dinner, when Torbjörn was busy getting the kids in bed, Onni had gone outside to meditate or something, and Trond had started his first shift of sleep in a ratty recliner in the storage room he'd claimed as his own.

Taru settled in across the table from Siv, and puffed on her cup of berry tea to cool it, trying to read Siv's expression. Mostly she just looked tired, but her fingers were scratching along her own cup in a jerky, nervous way.

"I'm trying not to think about what happens next, if you were going to ask," she started.

Taru had been about to ask. "It never hurts to think ahead, Siv."

"It hurts a little."

"You'll get over it." She tried her tea. It had a sharp flavor. Not bad. "And the world's other unbelievers might take a little longer to come around, but that's only a problem here and with the Danes."

"Sure, we hardly count," Siv mumbled.

"Compared to the Icelanders, who does? That's in our favor here. So, time to start laying out a strategy. The order of operations I'm thinking - tell me if you see something wrong with this, please -"

"Besides the harebrained superstition at the heart of it, obviously."

"Yes, assuming harebrained superstition triumphs over- no, let's say, _will contribute_ to the triumph that had eluded solid science alone for so long?" Taru hoped that took the sting out a little. It wouldn't do to ignore Siv's background here, when that and her hyper-critical eye could be so useful in putting together a plan that would actually work, and work _soon_.

Siv sipped at her tea, with a still-stormy expression, but said nothing.

"Step one: we tip Reykjavik off to what we're doing. Maybe get Onni in touch with some of their mages to talk shop, at least as much as they can despite their different methods. At least he's done some talking to the team's new guy, right?"

"Apparently," Siv said evenly. Everyone in the household at the wrong time had heard _some_ of those conversations last winter, either when Onni ceased to be amicable to conversation with the Icelander, or when one of the radios malfunctioned.

"So we'll get him on this too. And we'll have parallel trials in _comparatively_ little time." It would take months if they were lucky, years if they weren't, but it wouldn't take _decades_ to get a definitive answer, right? Taru might live to see the end of rash sickness in the Known World, and then ...

"And if those don't work? If today's _results_ are not replicable by other mages?"

"Unless Onni's tricks stop working, we'll still have something, won't we? And I imagine he could at least pass it on to other mages in _our_ tradition. If they don't find anything in Iceland, we do have a problem -"

"Just the one?" Siv could sound so _polite_ when she was being rude.

"It's the only one we can anticipate, and plan for. And it's that there _aren't_ so many Finnish mages, comparatively speaking. If it takes Finnish magic to cure the rash ..."

"That would be a significant limitation even in this rosiest of scenarios." Siv sighed. "Of course, they can't - or at least I can't imagine they would - write the whole thing off without quite a few trials."

"Which would take how long, assuming best scientific practices?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better. How often does something infected wash up in Iceland?"

"Probably not as often as we'd like, in this particular case. I never noticed more than three alerts in a year, when I was there."

"So..." Siv's eyes darted upward – left, right –  calculating, and recalibrating, something like a timeline they could work with.

"The Icelanders might need to come out somewhere less sheltered than the capital's labs, _if_ we can ensure they're interested enough in a speedy process. Given that, we'd need -?"

Siv blinked. "For human trials, barring a few very unlucky victims turning up desperate enough to try anything? We're at least five years out."

Taru stared, then realized she'd stranded her tea halfway between the table and her mouth. "Five. Years."

"That's assuming, again, expedited research now. And somewhere safe enough to send their best and brightest mages to assist in the trials. Mora should be satisfactory to them, and there must be something serviceable on Bornholm – maybe up on the northern coast, I'd have to check. Is there anything in Finland remotely like the facilities my team, for instance, would need?" Taru shrugged, and Siv added: "Think what you saw today, but five times bigger and twice as secure."

"Saimaa might have a few upgradable prospects – if I can dig their exact location on the fallen islands out of some fairly secret records, that is."

"Oh?" And then: " _Oh._ "

Oh indeed. The cleanup for any of those facilities would be horrible. Working toward a cure, toward ensuring that nothing like what went down there would happen again, was the one thing Taru could imagine making it worth doing.

She shook her head and pushed on. "If they don't bite, we could always try Keuruu instead. They do have a small quarantine facility, but it hasn't been used in over a decade. It might just barely suffice, with the right adjustments."

"Sounds great. Let's start with that when we write the council: the only magic we're confident is worth trying out against the rash is most extensively practiced in Keuruu, where some old unused buildings might suffice. Just barely. With magic?" Siv clasped her hands together like a pleading child, faking a smile that could chip ice.

"Hey, some seiðkona might manage to scribble out a picture that kills the rash like Onni's runo did. That’s still plan A, remember?"

"I'm trying to."Elbows on the table, she dropped her face into her hands. "I'm also still trying to convince myself that this _isn't_ proof of the existence of at least one Swedish god  - or devil – which happens to have an unthinkably twisted sense of humor."

That didn't sound so unlike some of the gods Norwegian troll hunters had described to Taru, frankly. "That's the spirit!"  

"Ha, ha." Siv mumbled into her hands. "So is this plan half-baked yet?"

Taru considered it. "Enough to work with, at least on my part."

They finished the tea in companionable silence.

"All right," Taru said, startling Siv out of what must have been at least the start of an uncomfortable nap. "I won't keep you up any longer. You have work to do tomorrow."

"You had to remind me, didn't you?"

"But call me if there's any progress. Or who knows, some other major breakthrough we could integrate here. We'll want to get the ball rolling on this as fast as possible."

Surprisingly, Siv smiled. Small but distinct. "Yes, we will. Despite all of your significant limitations?"

" _Our s_ ignificant limitations, Siv." Taru stood up. After trying and failing to find a place for her cup in the sink, she rinsed it out and set it on the counter instead. "Good night."

"Sleep well, Taru."

She wouldn't, of course, but that wasn't always such a bad thing. Not when she had so much to think about.

 


End file.
